"All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not" -- former FBI agent

Are the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other federal agencies secretly working with telecommunication firms to record your every call for later use, if necessary? That's the alarming possibility that's being raised by supposed leaks from government officials claiming that the investigation of last month's Boston bombing has refocused on phone calls the suspects placed to friends and family prior to the attack.

I. All Digital Communications Belong to Us

Concern intensified when on a segment of CNN's Out Front with Erin Burnett, former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente suggested that the FBI has access to every U.S. citizen's phone conversations past and present.

The exchange went as follows:

Erin Burnett:
Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

Tim Clemente:
No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

EB:
So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

TC:
No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.

In other words, according to this former FBI agent and well respected expert, every single conversation made by an American via wired or wireless phone signals is being recorded, in most cases without a warrant.

Further, some are extrapolating his phrasing "no digital communication is secure" -- to suggest that the government and its corporate partners are also intercepting all other forms of communication, such as instant messages, emails, and private forum posts. If accurate, again this interception would be in most cases without warrant.

II. Veterans Charged, Harassed by FBI for Blowing the Whistle

The program in question may trace back to the Pentagon and Nation Security Agencies' "Total Information Awareness" program (TIA), which launched in 2002 following the 9/11 attacks. Officially that project -- whose goal was ostensibly comprehensive warrantless surveillance 24/7 of every American -- was scrapped amid public outcry. But critics say the sweeping, Orwellian, and likely unconstitutional surveillance program was slowly and iteratively installed under more innocent sounding names in years to come.

U.S. National Security Agency official William (Bill) Binney in late 2001 resigned over the government spending "millions and millions of dollars" on TIA's predecessor "TrailBlazer". He commented on the system, "It's better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had."

Mr. Binney was just one of several NSA officials to resign when they realized the scope of what the Bush administration's intelligence agencies were planning. J. Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis also left in protest and joined the complaint.

A fellow Trailblazer protester, former NSA agent and U.S. Air Force and Navy Thomas Andrews Drake spent a half-decade between 2000 and 2004 working his way up the command chain filing protests and complaints against Trailblazer. He would eventually leak allegedly non-classified information to reporters after his complaints internally fell on deaf ears.

The FBI have been busy raiding the houses of whistleblowers over the last decade and charging them with ambiguous "crimes". [Image Source: Global Elite]

After decades of honorably serving their country Binney, Drake, and others found themselves under the microscope, having their homes raided by the FBI. In 2010, the government threw virtually every ambiguous charge it could against Mr. Drake, including counts of obstructing justice, making a false state, and computer fraud for "exceeding authorized use" of a computer. Most charges were eventually dropped, but Mr. Drake pled down, pleading guilty to the exceeding authorized use charge.

President Obama has had no tolerance for "snitches" in the intelligence community.

[Image Source: AP]

President Obama's crackdown on whistleblowers has been called unprecedented.

III. Surveillance Continues at Room 641a and Other Secret Locations

Meanwhile, in a 2007-era whistleblower-report supporting a lawsuit filed against the federal government by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an expert witness suggested that the surveillance efforts were alive and well. The witness in a court deposition wrote that the NSA had worked with AT&T, Inc. (T), the second largest wireless carrier in the country on a program to "vacuum up" phone traffic, internet traffic, emails, and more without warrant.

In that report, a retired 22-year AT&T technician, Mark Klein, recalls "that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" and that "contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic."

The alleged interception took place at a shadowy site dubbed "Room 641a" at an AT&T facility in San Francisco, Calif. The room allegedly used splitters to duplicate and record every single communication for the region over fiber optic lines. The facility was reportedly just one of multiple such facilities across the country. Mr. Klein said he believed that virtually every major telecom/internet service provider was involved in the scheme and that virtually every form of digital communication was being recorded, based on his own first-hand experience.

IV. Many Americans Happy to Live in "1984 State" in Exchange for Safety

Many naïvely hoped that under the President Barack Obama who campaigned under the slogan "Hope" that the domestic surveillance would be scaled back. They pointed to a noisy "liberal" minority in Congress, which included Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oreg.) and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) who had often warned that Americans would be "shocked" to know the extent of surveillance (members of Congress cannot share information on such programs, as that would be a crime).

President Obama and his predecessor President Bush agree on many things, including that the federal government should be granted unregulated spying on its citizens.
[Image Source: WhiteHouse.gov]

The majority in both parties has embraced the perspective that the need for security trumps civil liberties.

Rep. Paul famously exclaimed on a late night television program, "Democracy isn't all that healthy in this country because if you're in a third party... you don't get in the debates... And if you ever come to the conclusion -- heaven forbid -- that the two parties aren't all that different, then what is left really?"

In 2010 when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates briefly banned the use of Blackberries over Blackberry Ltd.'s (TSE:BB) refusal to give government regulators access to its encryption codes to customer communications, President Obama condemned the move. But just weeks later his cabinet demanded access to all digital communications "including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct 'peer to peer' messaging like Skype."

RIM eventually caved to the Arab nations' demands, installing similar surveillance systems as it allows in the U.S. and India.

In other words the consistent theme of the Obama administration's message to foreign governments has seemingly been: Do as I say, not as I DO.

4 out of 10 Americans would give up their Constitutional freedoms for safety from terrorism.
[Source: Conservative Action Alerts]

But that may not hurt the administration as much politically as it would have in the past. A poll [PDF] by CNN/TIME/ORC found out that approximately 4 out of 10 Americans would support giving up "some civil liberties" in the name of fighting an ambiguous "terrorism" threat. That number is down just slightly since 9/11/2001, when 6 out of 10 Americans said they would gladly surrender their civil rights for safety.

While many might see merit in such arguments of safety and convenience, it's perhaps best to close with the words of Ben Franklin, who in his notes to the Pennsylvania Assembly famously wrote, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

While a single phone call can be recorded with a relatively small amount of data, ALL the phone calls would take up a an awful lot of storage space. My guess is that the program in question stores calls for a very short period of time (probably less than a day) UNLESS certain keywords show up OR one of the callers is on a watch list.

That said, this is an afront to our liberties. We are now entering a fascist police state.

Don't you remember the actual phone calls on 9/11 being pulled from the providers for both analysis and also delivery to the families?

All wireless carriers 'cache' voice and text for a variable period of time. If something happens, the FBI (or local law enforcement) will subpoena it. This isn't the government eavesdropping without a warrant. It is modern technology. People already know that anything put online will be there forever. They know that deleting a file from their hard drive doesn't mean that it can't be recovered. Now they know that what they say on the phone THAT PASSES THROUGH THE NETWORK OF A PRIVATE COMPANY is retained for some small period of time.

I don't believe that's true. Carriers do not retain voice calls at all, unless they're captured on a voicemail system or unless they're part of a wiretap. This is false information. A lot of stuff has been stated about 9/11 and only a tiny fraction of it is true.

They do have records of called and calling numbers, and those provide a lot of information.

It's likely that the NSA captures a great deal of voice and text traffic. What percentage of communications that represents is not clear. I have read that the NSA is building a massive facility to increase the amount of storage space and analytic capabilities it has for monitoring communications.

Ooooh, I can suggest a wonderful conspiracy theory for how they built a storage facility. Remember those floods that destroyed all that hard drive manufacturing capacity and how hard drives became so scarce afterwards... OR DID IT?!?!? Dum dum DUUUHM!

Please. It's *exactly* eavesdropping without a warrant. Or at least that's what it becomes the moment any government agency accesses the information for any purpose, with or without probable cause.

They have no grounds whatsoever to access conversations recorded at a time when no legal authority to wiretap/record conversations had been issued. That a private organization happened to produce the recordings is irrelevant; just because recordings exist doesn't mean that the government can legally make use of them. And if they ever tried to present such information as evidence before a court, you can bet it would be thrown out due to the fact that it was attained without a warrant.

It's not eavesdropping if no one listens to it. The only time people bother to even spend the time to find the data is when you're being investigated on a high priority level.

When you request data in storage like this, you get a data dump so you don't have to request it multiple times. Trust me, everyone hate sifting through a data dump. It will take you days or weeks to find one little thing you want.

Like the article says, you can't identify a person with this low quality audio. It won't be admissable as evidence even if it's legal. The only point of this is to get clues to help with the investigation. As a regular person committing no serious crime, I don't think anyone will ever listen to a single audio track containing your voice in it.

the recording of e everyone's phone calls have been going on for decades. back in the mid 90s, my phone rang, I picked it up and heard the conversation I had hours earlier... it played for several seconds... then dead. not sure why... a glitch in their system. (the matrix lol)

so yeah, their system looks for keywords that relates to terrorism or or certain death threats... that's a security issue. for day to day junk... they could care less.

hell, newscorp/fox hacks phones and computers for years... hence they are under investigations and possible trial.

No, they can go back at least months, most likely years. The FBI agent providing this revelation indicated they could go back and listen to all the calls the Boston bombers had with their mother and see if she had any involvement.

On one hand, I’m glad that this capability is only used for terrorism and national security related crimes. On the other, I find it a huge violation of my privacy to know, well, that I no longer have any privacy. At all.

Not many people know that what got Elliot Spitzer caught with prostitutes wasn’t that he got busted in some sting or other random police trap. It was because he liked the really expensive whores, and the government flagged him for withdrawing too much cash.

quote: I’m glad that this capability is only used for terrorism and national security related crimes.

It is naive to think that this type of power is only used for terrorism and national security. Say something wrong to the right person in power... pretty soon you'll be looked into as well--terrorist or not.

What's going to stop those that have the power from abusing it? Nothing. Not a darn thing. Because... "talking about it is a crime."

See the problem here?

The Federal Government in no way, shape or form has any reason or legitimate right to have power like this. Ever. Terrorism or not. They should never, ever have this kind of power.

1. The only realistic way that this could be happening is a "flagging" system where certain words are flagged and said communications are recorded. That method also come with the issue of false flags like a virus detector getting a false positive.

2. This capability, much like NSLs, has the great capability for malicious use by authorities unless proper oversight and fitting consequences for malicious use are utilized. It is, as long as it is done properly, a good thing for the general public.

Flagging or not, I believe it is a violation of our First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution.

A court of law should be the only thing that can authorize a search or seizure of property. Property in this case is information--or our thoughts. Our thoughts are protected by the First Amendment as it is our right to have and speak them freely without repercussions.

quote: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Constitution is clear on this. By collecting information based on a key word (which I don't think is the only thing they do), even then, would be a violation of the document because a Judge never issued a warrant to collect the information. Not only that, but as I see it, even looking at the information is a violation of wiretapping statutes.

Why do we tolerate this? Why do people think it is okay? Are we all resolute in our acceptance that terrorism has won and fear must dominate our lives?

Guess what? We /already/ had a provision in the Constitution to safeguard us against terrorism! It is known as the Second Amendment! There is no need to infringement upon our freedoms to keep us secure! None!

The people can police themselves. They need not rely upon our Government to keep them secure. If the people actually gave a darn enough to wake up one day and stop looking at their PDAs, start caring enough to carry protection by arming themselves and grew enough spine stand up for their neighbors... we wouldn't be where we are right now.

I'm sorry, I refuse to accept that any of this is a good thing for the general public. Even "safeguards" that supposedly can be put in place to only record "necessary" information are a weak lie at best. None of this is needed. None of this should be accepted.

As for the post after yours--even with all the checks and balances in place, it only takes one or two people to tell the Department of Justice to "look the other way" until the statute of limitations passes. Oh, now I'm sounding like Tom Clancy but perhaps his thoughts are genuinely worth consideration.

Americans need to wake up and start realizing their Freedom--their way of life, is in jeopardy and only as guaranteed as those in power want them to be right now. The people don't care enough anymore to deserve any of them.

There's no compromise on monitoring our phonecalls or computing. The moment a compromise is made is the moment more compromises can be "justified" in the name of "whatever evil is named at the moment" by those in power at the time.

Any type of power is abused anywhere regardless if it's government or not. At least in the government, there are systems set up to stop these malicious intents. Is it perfect? no.

For example, these data centers are separate from the people using it. To use it, you need to request access and have justification. You leave a trail of evidence behind you that is not erasable despite what Hollywood makes you believe. The only problem no one will catch on until it becomes abuse and shows a pattern to raise eye brows. Unfortunately, there's not enough people to monitor everything so that is why it could take months to years before someone is caught. On top of that, an investigation must take place. That is why you always see news about someone being caught after years of their crimes.

If you don't notice, there's been a new degree program in the past few years and it's called IT Information Security. It wasn't primarily developed to stop hackers from China. That is just one of its objective. The government is hiring 10s of thousands of IT Info Sec specialists to monitor and improve the network. They also need them to assist criminal investigation and development. If you want to a quick way to get a 6 figure job right now, that is the field you want to be in.

Don't worry, the FBI or CIA won't bother to listen to any of your calls unless an investigation requires them to. They don't have that many people in their agencies and most of them are not agents. Everyone operates under clearances, agreements and oaths. Believe me, no one wants to lose their clearance or do stupid stuff for kicks. Losing your clearance means your career is gone and no one will ever employ you. On top of that, you have a good chance of going to federal prison. Yea clearances gets you high pay, cool jobs and all but your life will be boring and your liabilities are high.

I'd have to say BS. The storage space needed for all TEXTS delivered in one day would be great. Now add voice and from every cell for days or months, or years as one poster on here has said,- hugh storage needed!

Until you realize that 160 million Americans making 1 hour of telephone calls a day stored at 64kbps audio rate would result in 33 PETAbytes of data. That's 34,000 terabytes or 35,000,000 gigabytes. In a single day.

Assuming they used 16kbps compressed audio you could cut it by 75% but you're still looking at 8.4 petabytes a day or 8,600 terabytes.

If you didn't read this article and immediately think BS, you're either incredibly gullible or not nearly as "techie" as you think you are.

because a text transcription requires the audio to be translated into words. The problem with voice recognition is it's no efficient enough. The best voice recognition is and will always be a human.

Google and Apple has made strides in voice recognition but it is still not efficient. You think that it works most of the time because it recognize the most used words. So it's basically using probability to guess words more than recognizing words. But I have to say it is 100x better than what we had in the 90s. Still not anywhere close to being able to perfect transcribe something.

Your contrived and fabricated example is of course tailored to come out to the conclusion you wish it to. I doubt 160 million americans spend a full hour per day on the phone. Also, even 16kbit/s is excessive for what you need to store simple voice communication in a very narrow frequency band (500Hz-3kHz roughly.)

Text storage is nothing compared to current drive space.Phone conversations would be much higher, but with the advances in storage the past few years, it's not a big deal.

With 4TB drives, I can build a simple 2U server with 48TB of storage. With Raid 6, that would still be 40TBYou can install 20 2u servers in a rack, so that's 800TB of raid storage in a single rack. Multiply that by 40-50 racks, and they could store anything they want, in duplicate.

Do you still think the government, with the trillions it spends, couldn't afford to store all the texts/calls people make?

See my comment: you have your sense of scale wrong regarding audio. Even at 16kbps, with 160 million Americans making 1 hour of phone calls a day would result in petabyts of data... for a single day. Even if redundancy wasn't an issue it would take nearly 3000 3 TB hard drives to store a single days worth of phone calls.

Carriers have trouble keeping up with the services they make money from and have no desire to lose money by doing things that don't make them money. Everything in the telecom world is engineered close to capacity to save money. Thus, telecoms only buy new storage when they absolutely have to.

The idea that the telecoms would spend vast amounts of money to store conversations with no profit to be made is absurd. Telecoms argue endlessly over whether to put more money into voicemail systems, network capacity, etc. Nobody would be able to justify wasting money on storing conversations for no reason.

The NSA, on the other hand, might want to do this and might eventually have the capacity to do so. They're the ones to be concerned about.

The other thing is people don't even average 1 hr a day. I'm on the phone maybe a total of 4 hrs a month. My work phone barely gets used also. Information is more reliable through text messages and emails. I only know of one person that actually use more than 900 minutes a month but that's because she didn't have a job.

That would be you, but there are many work places and people who spend more than 1 hour per day on the phone as an average. You make a god point about the compression and the bitrates but messed up thinking that you represent the average people when it comes to telephone use.

In my line of work, Quantum and a few others are very big within government IT. You see some very extensive systems being deployed. I've even see on with a robot using hard drives. The actual walls where the stored the drives was bigger than a couple of Imax theater walls slapped together. And then there were multiple walls.

And yet the Library of Congress is right now embarking on a project to record every tweet that every twit ever twittered for posterity.

Believe, my friend. The NSA already has one facility that covers square miles of land. The budget for that outfit is estimated at over 50 billion a year. All they do is listen to, record and analyze electronic communications.

The space needed for texts is miniscule. A full-length text message is 140 bytes, and that's if you type a 160 character text.

A normal 1 TB hard drive would store about 7 billion texts. Most texts are smaller than this, and some people send pictures, but as you can see it doesn't really come out to be a whole lot. Wikipedia says that in 2010, about 6.1 trillion texts were sent worldwide. So it would be easily storable in a very small datacenter.

No, it wouldn't require all that much space to record all phone communications. Remember, conversational voice has much lower fidelity requirements than music. While a 128 kbps stream of music doesn't sound all that great (for music), you can have crystal clear voice conversations with just 6 kbps. Voice over IP, for example, works just fine over a dial-up modem. Plus it's highly compressible using modern codecs like AAC or MP3, so it takes up even less storage space.

Text messages and email don't take much space either, with the exception of large binary email attachments. Text is highly compressible.

With modern codecs and compression algorithms, combined with modern multi-terabyte hard drives, storing all this information is no sweat. The challenge is in the software that's used to search and access all this data. But then again, companies like Google have spent millions of man hours developing exactly this sort of big-data software tools. Heck, Google even packages and sells it, in the form of a Google Appliance.

If this were true it would be really easy for a large number of americans to defeat. All that needs to be done is basically a denile of service attack. You get a whole bunch of people or a botnet to use the "keywords" over and over again. The FBI and NSA wouldn't have the manpower to be able to sift through all the conversations. just saying --- I am Spartacus

"We are going to continue to work with them to make sure they understand the reality of the Internet. A lot of these people don't have Ph.Ds, and they don't have a degree in computer science." -- RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis